This is enhanced if students have a chance to choose what they want to read, if the students are struggling to understand every word, the students can
hardly be reading for pleasure. It is the main goal of this activity. This means that English teachers need to provide books which either by chance or because they
have been especially written, are readily accessible to the students.
5
3. Models of Reading
There are three complementary ways in processing a text.
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Those ways are as follows:
a. Bottom-Up Models
These models assume that reading involves the way the reader builds up a meaning from the text by creating a piece by piece mental translation.
Recognizing letters and words and working out sentence structures are conducted in a linear fashion. In this case, the reader must scrutinize the
vocabulary and syntax to meet the same point of view as the writer intended.
b. Top-Down Models
Top-Down Models state that r eading depends on the readers’ expectations
which is conducted to draw inferences and to interpret assumptions. The readers have their own set of goals while reading a text. They direct their eyes
to the most likely place where the useful information can be found. Furthermore, the reader may try to see the overall purpose of the text or get a
rough idea of the pattern of the writer’s argument.
c. Interactive Models
These models take useful ideas from a bottom-up perspective and combine
them with the key ideas from top-down views. Practically, a reader shifts from one focus to another, adopting top-down models to predict the probable
meaning, than moving to the bottom-up approach to check whether that is really what the writer says.
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Jeremy Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching, op.cit., p. 283.
6
William Grabe and Fredrika L. Stoller, Teaching and Reasearching Reading, England: Pearson Education, 2002, pp. 32
– 33.
